Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Divide and rule?

It is, at one level, profoundly true that the Global Establishment, the international power elite, operate on a basis of divide and rule - but the proper question concerns the aims of that rule.

But divide and rule? - yes. What this means in practice is that the same people support both sides, and demonise both sides - so that neither side can win, or lose; and conflict is permanent.

Think about Israel and Palestine - in mainstream politics half the people support Israel and believe that the Global Establishment support the Palestinians - the other half of mainstream politics believe the opposite. Both are correct. The Global Establishment support both sides, propagandise against both sides; fund journalists on both sides, organise riots on both sides. They fan hopes and fears, pride and resentment - on both sides, back and forth. Neither side has the upper hand, both sides are insecure; both sides believe they will eventually prevail - the crisis, hostilities continue, and continue...

Increased and micro-level surveillance and monitoring; ever more laws and regulations - many contradictory so everyone is always in breach of something; micro-level rules, regulations and protocols; sweeping and contradictory, and always changing social practices...

The system is against drugs, but drug usage is increased; this is a good thing, also a bad thing - it must be increased, it must be stopped. People are drugged into euphoria, and into misery. Life is extended by this, it is also being shortened by that. We want health care for everyone, everyone a patient - we also support cuts, restrictions, elimination...

We care about everyone as an individual - we care only about those who are useful - or those who are useless...

The System exists only for economic efficiency and to make profit - it is also the most wasteful and inefficient chaos imaginable. There is constantly shortage: money must be saved, cuts made - and there are new plans, funds, schemes, demands, subsidies...

Modern mainstream politics is also divide and rule; the classes, then races, then sexes were set against one another - then were subdivided by new races, sexual orientations and new sexes.

Everyone is a victim - everyone is an oppressor.

Both sides are supported, both sides are undermined; each side thinks the other side dominant, favoured - No end to it all, but more of the same.

So we are increasingly divided and we are increasingly ruled by an increasingly unitary system. But why? What is it all for? What's it aimed at?

Is there a kind of stable end-point being aimed at?

No - because the aim is not political, nor economic - it is not to make people happier, nor more miserable.

This is spiritual warfare - the strategy is not human but demonic.

The system is a system of damnation - a system designed to attain the very difficult objective of making numerous free individuals choose to refuse to repent and assert sin; to reject Heaven and embrace Hell.

The System is designed to persuade us to choose that we are Not free, to choose that Good is really evil and vice versa - that everything we know in our hearts is false; everything we find abhorrent is actually virtuous.

It is a big ask, a colossally difficult matter - for a relatively small number of demonic spirits to convince The World to embrace a state of permanent fear and resentment...

But - credit where due - the demons are doing an effective job of it; they are making great strides; they are winning the war.

Oh yes - things really are going their way, and the opposition shrinks and looks feebler by the week...

The Iran - Iraq conflict is another related example in which all the major powers were arming both sides with the goal of having them wipe each other out.

The entity that is ultimately behind this "divide and rule" business has different names depending on culture, the most popular being Ahriman. The behavior of the main acolytes revolves around manipulative exploitation: using superior intelligence and chutzpah to get groups of "chumps" to fight each other and then profit from the resulting chaos.

Lucifer believes that, God being loving, if enough people end up damned, God in mercy will simply waive the requirement of repentance and humble submission to the laws of justice. Further, that God having done this, Satan will be free to rule in Heaven.

Of course this is entirely nonsensical, an important thing to realize is that Satan is not the only one who believes it possible, nor the only one who thinks to rule in Heaven once God eliminates the demands of justice.

Belief in demons = Insane; As a general secular 'litmus' test (to borrow the phrase I know you often like to use) for insanity and this is exactly the kind of belief (perhaps even more so than a belief in God; a similarly crazy thing to say out loud in the modern world) that will immediately disqualify you from being taken seriously ever again or probably even listened to ever again by a 'normal' person. To invoke an explanation for something contingent on a belief in demons is tantamount to advertising that one is probably a paranoid schizophrenic and probably a dangerous threat to society.

The reason why I say this is because, as I have said elsewhere, it seems to me that if someone is to proselytize for Christianity (as I assume you intend to do with this blog) then part of that would seem to necessitate providing some sort of bridge from one mindset with its metaphysical assumptions to another. Definitions of what constitute madness (or appears to be madness) would seem to be key to that transition (such as if we consider the development of Robert Pirzig in ZAMM). I find it fascinating that specifically a trained psychiatrist, such as yourself, should have transitioned from a world in which only mentally ill patients referred to demons with grandiose schemes for damning mankind (and presumably you solidly regarded this kind of belief as pathological/delusional whilst still an atheist) to a time in your life when you are asserting that the psychiatrists are sick for not believing certain supernatural claims of what would likely still be considered by the psychiatric community as geniune delusional mental illness. Taken a step further it would see your view of madness might be described as "any world view that is not strictly Christian is a distortion of reality and is therefore a kind of delusional madness."

It seems only fair to acknowledge that to believe in demons is a very big step for a modern mind to make. It strains credability for certain. But if we look at the bible, there it is as plain as day! In Shakespeare and much respected historic lierature there it is again! It seemed our ancestors took it for granted, so when did we stop believing in these supernatural beings? Presumably they must be delighted no one believes anymore; all the easier to hide in the shadows and do dark deeds. I wonder is it just the West that has lost this ingrained 'superstition' in dark forces, whilst other cultures still firmly do still recognise it?! Having said that I find it hard to imagine a modern demonologist, perhaps at the Vatican (do such things exist? It's a very Da Vinci Code conception) sipping a latte at Starbooks in Rome and using a lap-top to write a report on a recent demonic possession witnessed by some catholics at a farmhouse in rural Tuscany. As you can see, I also find it hard to treat the idea very seriously but when I pause to reflect I find I am compelled to do exactly that or else I am just cherry picking the positive bits from Christianity and ignoring the rest. Presumably this too is now universal for modern Christians.

Oddly, I do have an enduring memory of being at medical school well over a decade ago, well before I became a Christian. The memory is of being on a psychiatric placement and of encountering Evangelical Christian medical students openly discussing their belief that some specific patients were possessed by demons and apparently ACTUALLY TELLING some specific patients that the voices in their heads were demonic voices! (Admittedly I did not directly witness this second part but was told by a group of deeply confused, angry and dumbstruck non-Christian medical students). Wow, I am sure you can imagine just how bizarre and scary that was for a straight ahead atheist rational scientist comfortable in the knowledge that he is sane and reasonable and things that go bump in the night are just horror stories. Certainly demons were not things an intelligent, enlightened young chap such as myself could possibly believe. But there they were these evangelical medical students: studying neuroscience and psychiatry just like me and clapping and dancing and singing in Church about some 2000 year old dead guy called Jesus! I remember feeling as though my brain might shatter trying to understand this and when I failed I decided they were mad, deluded and brainwashed - probably, they should be barred from practice or reprimanded severely for misconduct wrt how they had spoke about their bizarre ideas with vulnerable mentally ill patients. That was then. Now I have quite a different point of view but still I wonder "What is madness?"

@David - Good comments! In a sense the modern insanity is another inversion: things believed by everyone in the world until a couple of decades ago and still believed by billions of people are regarded as insane, dumb or evil - and other things that are obviously incoherent, lies or delusions (recognised as such by 99% of people who have ever lived, including the greatest geniuses) are now mandatory official knowledge - taught to young children, denial of which is harshly punished...

Bruce - The perspective expressed in this post is very close to my own understanding, as it has been for the last few years, though it did take me a long time to come round to it. For quite some time, I believed that most (not all) of the apparent contradictions were best explained by sheer human incompetence and stupidity at the highest levels of decision-making.

It may be that I had too much regard for Occam's famous razor - but like all intellectual tools, it is only as good as the metaphysical foundations that must underpin the factual material it has to work on. I used to not QUITE be able to bring myself to believe in the reality of purposive, non-human evil, despite having had far more direct personal experience of such than is given to most people nowadays (or maybe because of this). Without the firm foundation provided by the conviction that such a thing actually existed, I was at a loss to explain the varigated antics of the global agents of human evil or fit them for long into any kind of stable pattern, before yet another unbalancing contradiction threw everything into chaos once again. It was like trying to perform a complex, wide-ranging investigative procedure on a table made of somewhat wobbly jelly, where nothing would really stay in place for long.

In the circumstances, the easiest way to make sense of the ever-shifting contradictions was to assume that there was no real overriding agenda, just many greedy, rather stupid, and evilly-inclined humans pursuing their own conflicting agendas with a peculiar degree of self-assurance and very little concern for the consequences. This seemed like a resonably parsimonious explanation, though I was still puzzled as to how such idiots could possibly have attained such power in the first place, or be able to hold on to it for so long - it seemed that the amount of success they were having was not really consonant with their evident unfitness to attain it or make use of it.

Some trends which have remained remarkably consistent over time also had to be dismissed as more-or-less coincidental byproducts of human evil - such as the fact that privacy has been under ever-incresing pressure (even though you might have thought human evildoers would actually value notions of privacy for their own ultimate protection), and that the sexual revolution has been inflicted so assiduously on the whole population over several generations, being constantly pushed further each time a new barrier is broken down and accepted as normal (when the chaos this causes would seem to go against the ultimate interests of a ruling class that were mostly interested in exploiting the masses as a source of labour and profit to their evil selves). Perhaps it was not such a very good explanation after all then!

If something like demonic or diabolic evil does not enter the equation, however, such contradictions cannot really be adequately explained, so dismissing them as coincidence is the most straightforward choice. It is certainly much more straightforward than engaging with secular conspiracy theory, which must become massively complex in order to resolve the conflict between what it must assume are wholly materialistic goals, and outcomes which are often wildly inconsistent in these terms.

@H - For me, the tipping-point came when I realised that the US/ UK/ EU interventions in the Middle East (e.g. Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria and others) all had the rapid and consequence of purging Christians - which was then not reported. Again and again the same pattern was followed of destabilisation, military intervention, induced chaos and forming new terror armies (from Western funded and trained militias). Plus this now leads to (organised, funded, welcomed-by-officials) mass migrations across thousands of miles to The West. Too stereotypical, too many coincidences.

Bruce - Yes, this struck me strongly too, particularly the Syrian situation, coming on top of everything else that had happened over the last few years. There was evidently going to be a great and horrifying purge of Christians in Syria if the rebel groups deniably (though not convincingly so) supported, financed, and propagandized-for by the West actually won. Anyone who paid attention knew this because the more extreme (or perhaps just shameless) elements quite openly SAID that they were intending to do so - which could be found with only a little digging, though the media unsurprisingly seemed in no hurry to report it.

The propaganda unanimously unleashed in the West, telling us why we should support the nice, freedom and democracy-loving "rebels" (who just happened to be allied with and largely indistinguishable from the admittedly barbaric Islamist "terrorists", with the exact same goal of overthrowing the state) made not one iota of sense. However, it was very obvious that time would be up for the Syrian Christians if the Syrian state went down, since it was the only party involved when this began that wished to protect them and preserve the demographic status quo.

I presume the Russian intervention was not merely an act of geo-political pragmatism, but also - perhaps primarily - had the aim of protecting the Syrian Christians, especially since many were fellow Orthodox. (I don't wait with bated breath for the ongoing re-Christianization of Russia or the peril of the Syrian Christians to be popular subjects for Western reportage.) This looks like a major reason for the recent upsurge in anti-Russian propaganda in the West. I don't suppose those of evil intent who actually know what is going on (human or otherwise) were at all happy about being thwarted in Syria, or have quite given up on their nefarious plans for the place.